Bonkers Blog June 2011

As
many of you were keen to tell me at the beginning of the week, the obscene blog
which I believe could only be Bexley council inspired has disappeared from view.
It is still on line bearing my name but the content has been removed. I didn’t
know because I last looked at it on 1st June so thank you for the many
tip-offs.

The fact that the blog had been been augmented with more nonsense on 1st June
changed my attitude to it because clearly it wasn’t some one-off demented
idiocy by a close associate of Bexley council, it was likely to carry on.
A few minutes before it shut last Friday afternoon, I delivered a letter by hand
to Bexley council’s Contact Centre in the expectation it would be on the Chief
Executive’s desk on Monday morning. It said…

It has come to my attention that my visit to the Civic Centre with
Mr. Elwyn Bryant on 20th May 2011 which was known only to Mr. Loynes and one of his junior
colleagues was put on the web in the form of a Google ‘blogspot’ in my name
within hours of my departure.

In a similar vein my entry to the Cinema car park with Mr. Nicholas Dowling
where we would be totally unknown except to councillors or council officers was
also placed on the web.

The blog could only have been posted by someone with intimate knowledge of
Bexley council who has tracked my movements.

The blog is lewd in the extreme and is presumably an attempt to harass me at a
personal level. I demand an immediate investigation and response.

As you will know from reading this blog, Bexley’s Chief Executive is one
of the country’s top managers rewarded with a salary package approaching a
quarter of a million pounds a year and council leader Teresa O’Neill has said
that he represents “good value for money”. Naturally he flew into action on
hearing of such a serious crime apparently conducted under his nose. He phoned
me immediately, apologised profusely, assured me he would do everything in his
power to identify the culprit and have the offensive material posted in my name
removed just as soon as he possibly could. He then emailed every one of Bexley
council’s 63 councillors and told them in no uncertain terms that if they knew
anything at all about the offensive blog they were to close it down immediately.
You would expect nothing else of such a superb exponent of the professionalism of local
authority management.

Unfortunately none of that is true; well maybe the emailing of 63 councillors
bears some resemblance to the truth for as we all now know, the blog was removed
within hours of Mr. Tuckley receiving my letter. There has been absolutely
zero personal response to my suggestion that a very serious offence had been committed
by a council member or member of staff. I therefore decided the time had come to
take the advice of literally everyone who I had spoken to about the incident and
go to the police.

Yesterday the formal complaint was drawn up by my legal advisor and I took the
package to Bexleyheath police station, accompanied by Mr. Elwyn Bryant.
Elwyn you will remember was also accused by the blogger of disgusting acts on
council premises. A police
officer soon agreed that I had provided evidence of a crime however he seemed
rather reluctant to take action against Bexley council. He said anyone at all
might have accessed Mr. Loynes’s diary and therefore there were too many
suspects for an investigation to be practical. It seemed like an excuse that
might be used against almost any crime report and I responded in a suitable manner
to that and other similar theoretical obstacles to progress. At one time I had to ask if
the officer could think of any scenario, however far fetched, that someone at Bexley council
was not responsible for the offensive blog and he accepted that he
could not. Eventually Elwyn and I were left alone for a very long time while senior
officers were consulted. After that everything was plain sailing. My file was
taken as evidence that a crime had been committed and bundled up for the
attention of the Chief Inspector.

At the end of our time in the police interview room Elwyn and I were asked for
our address. “You live together?” “No”, said I. “Elwyn lives with his wife”. It
shows how the blogger was successfully propagating his views and needs to be
identified and prosecuted.

Although I have in the interests of comparative brevity detailed mainly my own
actions over this crime, Mr. Bryant took very similar actions himself and on
Monday morning this week emailed his formal complaint to council leader Teresa
O’Neill. He included an extract from the council inspired blog to illustrate his
complaint. The council leader replied with a brief acknowledgement that she
could not respond to his “offensive” email. So the council agrees with
everyone else. Their blog was highly offensive.

It remains to be seen what the police will do next. Since the news broke late
last night I have already received worrying information about the effectiveness
of the named Chief Inspector. We may yet see an interesting contrast with
the council being able to put me under threat of arrest, seemingly on a whim,
for blogging facts the council finds embarrassing. Nothing I have ever posted is
anywhere near being comparable to what has been blogged about Elwyn and me.
Perhaps we are about to see if council credit card spending on
lunch for
police commanders is money well spent or whether the police are willing to apply
the law equally to all.

Apologies for a rushed blog, I have to assist in the blowing out of 91
candles. Tomorrow things should begin to revert to normal.